Emil Cioran Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Emil Cioran on Wise Famous Quotes.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Extraordinary and null - these two adjectives apply to the sexual act, and, consequently, to everything resulting from it, to life first of all.
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.
I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.
Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past.
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.
It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
Characteristic of sickness to stay awake when everything sleeps, when everything is at rest, even the sick man.
I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.
When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.
The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity ...
Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.
We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job ...
Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay
A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
There is a whole range of melancholy: it begins with a smile and a landscape and ends with the clang of a broken bell in the soul
Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
In flawed families, a scion appears who dedicates himself to the truth and who ruins himself in its pursuit.
The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.
Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.
To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker.
There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
I don't know how to make peace with things, were each moment to tear itself away from time to give me a kiss.
Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator.
For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse.
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
Shyness, inexhaustible source of misfortunes in practical life, is the direct cause, indeed unique, each inner wealth.
To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.
One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.
Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.
A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.